Hidden Levels #4: Machinima

ROMAN MARS: I’m Roman Mars from 99% Invisible. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: And I’m Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread. 

ROMAN MARS: And this is Episode 4 of Hidden Levels, our show about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman, are you familiar with the concept of a video game trailer? 

ROMAN MARS: Well, I’ve never seen one, but I’m guessing it’s just like a movie trailer but for video games. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Ding ding ding. And as advertisements for video games, these things work on me. I spend a lot of time watching them. You know, the first video game trailer I remember–the one that got me to spend way too much time in high school putting off my homework and instead booting up, I think, Windows 95 to play a video game–was for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. 

WARCRAFT II: TIDES OF DARKNESS TRAILER The once mighty army of Azeroth lay among the blackened and charred remains of Stormwind Keep. Those that escaped fled across the Great Sea, bringing tales of the suffering they had faced at the hands of the orcish hordes…

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: The game was awesome, if pretty two-dimensional. But the trailer? The trailer was more three-dimensional. It actually doesn’t look that much like the game. It had these kind of sweeping camera angles in it–music that was super epic. And it kind of told its own story, just like a good movie trailer does. That all felt new and different to me in the video game world. 

ROMAN MARS: So, when I watch this, I mean, this really looks like a movie. It doesn’t look like a video game. It certainly doesn’t look like a game from 1995. Like, the camera angles–the presentation–it’s really cinematic. It almost seems like they’re lying about the game you’re about to play. But the key here is that this is all using the language of cinema, not the language of video games. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: That’s right. And one of the big changes in the last few decades of games is that as two-dimensional game environments became three-dimensional, Roman, graphics got better and game worlds became more open. Video games didn’t just get marketed like movies, they became more like movies themselves. Today, lots of Hollywood actors are in games. And many games have their own cinematographers. 

ROMAN MARS: And today on Hidden Levels, we’re going to talk about the increasingly blended worlds of games and movies and the boom and bust history of movies inside games. This episode is from 99 PI contributor Andrew Callaway. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: In 2020, Sam Crane was feeling lost. He’s a professional actor, and he had just booked the gig of a lifetime on London’s West End. But when the pandemic hit, all the theaters shut down and Sam was stuck waiting for the world to reopen. He wasn’t much of a video game person until he saw his son watching YouTube videos of people playing games. Then he realized there was a whole other world that hadn’t shut down. Sam got a hold of his son’s PlayStation and invited some friends to join him online. 

SAM CRANE: A lot of people found at that time that actually hanging out in those spaces is, like, really fun, certainly when compared to doing Zoom calls with friends or family. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: At first, he was just having fun. But artistic inspiration struck when he entered the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto V. 

NEWSCASTER: If you’re a parent, it should send shivers down your spine if you hear these three words… 

PETE MARTELL: Grand theft auto! 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Now, if you don’t know what Grand Theft Auto is, it’s only the most financially successful piece of entertainment ever. GTA is a video game in which you play as a gangster who’s trying to build a criminal empire. It’s notorious for its extreme cartoonish violence and cheat code hacks for minigames where your avatar can have sex with a stripper. For a game so crass in content, the level of detail in Grand Theft Auto is breathtaking, from autumn leaves falling to the reflection of the sunset glistening in ocean waves. And the city of San Andreas, where it all takes place, is so enormous you could spend ages exploring and still not find everything. So it was tucked away in a hidden area of the map that Sam made a discovery which charted the course for the next several years of his life. In one fortuitous moment, he found an empty theater. 

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): Ooh. Look at this. A massive kind of arena… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: This is a recording from Sam’s gameplay. 

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): I wonder if you could actually stage something here. 

MARK OOSTERVEEN (IN GAME): What, like, put on a play? 

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): Yeah… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: That first voice is Sam. And the second is Mark Oosterveen, Sam’s friend, fellow actor, and his guide through the world of GTA. Sam and Mark decided to stage a play in the Grand Theft Auto theater. And of course, our British friends obviously defaulted to Shakespeare–perhaps his most violent play–Hamlet. 

Now, GTA V Online is full of other players, real people from around the world, that you can interact with. Sam and Mark decided to use this aspect of the game to their advantage, filling the cast of their Hamlet by auditioning strangers from the streets of San Andreas. 

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): Oh, look, we’ve got another audience member here. This is Hamlet, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet… 

SAM CRANE: I just messaged everyone in the servers–I didn’t know who they were, they’re just random people in the server–saying, “Hey, we’re doing this performance.” Then a couple of people turned up. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: This was a fun idea, but they also knew it wouldn’t be easy because a lot of the other players in GTA are primed for violence. 

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other… 

SAM CRANE: It was, like, a real kind of electric feeling–that adrenaline you get in performance. 

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): Oh, and don’t kill the actors either…

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Since most interactions in the game involve murder, it’s a little bit strange to come across a group of folks standing around peacefully rehearsing a Shakespeare play. So, Sam and Mark found that every audition was a risk to their lives. 

SAM CRANE: And then obviously the fact that when they start shooting each other and then the police turn up… Again, that just adds to it. It was like, “Oh my God, this is alive. This is dangerous. This is, like, theatrical.”

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): Oh, [BLEEP]. It’s the police.

MARK OOSTERVEEN (IN GAME): Oh, farewell, honest soldier. Who has relieved you?

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): You can’t stop art, [BLEEP]! [BLEEP], they got me. 

MARK OOSTERVEEN (IN GAME): Me too.

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Staging this Grand Theft Auto version of Hamlet became a full-time obsession for Sam, whose wife, Pinny, is a documentary filmmaker. And since she also couldn’t practice her craft outside of the house, she decided to make her pandemic project a behind-the-scenes documentary of Sam’s pandemic project. 

PINNY GRYLLS: Sam and I had never worked together, but it kind of felt like, “Oh, this is territory that I kind of like and know about.”

PINNY GRYLLS (IN GAME): What does a filmmaker in GTA look like? 

SAM CRANE (IN GAME): Well, you can choose. 

PINNY GRYLLS (IN GAME): I would like to look slightly like Tilda Swinton, to be honest…

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Filming the game is easy. All you have to do is record the screen. But Pinny wanted to take what they were doing and make a real film out of it. She wanted it to look cinematic. 

In GTA, all the players carry guns, but they have the option of switching out their AR-15s for a cell phone, which receives missions and can be used to communicate with other players. This virtual cell phone also has a camera. So Pinny decided, instead of carrying a gun, she would switch to the cell phone and film everything with that. 

PINNY GRYLLS: You were able to go in and do close-ups with it, and it also made it very still, which was avoiding that swinging around footage that’s very hectic that you watch on YouTube. And it just meant that I had a sort of cinematic language; I had a variety of different shots. And I just thought, “I do actually think we can do this. It is going to be a film.”

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Over the next year, Sam and Mark staged their production of Hamlet inside GTA, and Pinny filmed the whole thing, which became a documentary called Grand Theft Hamlet. It’s filmed entirely inside the game. You never see Mark or Sam’s real life bodies, only their GTA avatars. Grand Theft Hamlet played at South by Southwest in 2024, where it won Best Documentary Feature. I saw it there and it blew my mind. It looks like an animated film, but it isn’t really. What makes Grand Theft Hamlet special is that it’s a documentary filmed entirely in an active, virtual world, full of real people’s avatars. It’s so uncanny to watch because it has all the surreality and beauty of an animated film, but it’s also spontaneous and awkward, like a real life documentary. To me, it felt like an entirely new kind of movie. And to Pinny, it felt that way making it. 

PINNY GRYLLS: Obviously I’d never made a film inside a computer game, so it was quite a new challenge. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Part of the uncanny feeling of watching Grand Theft Hamlet was that it felt so inevitable. Like, of course a movie taking place entirely inside a video game works. Why hasn’t anybody done this before? But it turns out Grand Theft Hamlet is not the first movie made inside a game. They had stumbled on a whole tradition, going back to the 1990s. And it even has a name: Machinima. The word “Machinima” is a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema.” Some people prefer to say “Machine-ima.” I’m using “Machinima.” Both pronunciations are totally fine. What’s important is that it refers to movies that were filmed using video games. And it was coined back in 1998. Back then, Roger Ebert–the most famous film critic of all time–asked if video game tech would revolutionize the way we make movies. 

ROGER EBERT: And here’s a bulletin. The Sony PlayStations that will be marketed next year will have about the same computing power as the computers that made Toy Story. Kids will be able to create real-time animation on their own computers. Will that be the beginning of an artistic renaissance, or maybe will it just make for more point-and-shoot video games? Well, it’s a good question… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: That is a good question, Roger Ebert. The mainstream is just starting to warm up to these kinds of machinimated movies. But 30 years ago, an artistic renaissance was already underway because there are some stories that can only be told in the virtual world. 

One of the pioneers of Machinima is the animator Paul Marino. Well before Grand Theft Hamlet and the pandemic, in 1997, Paul was working in film and television, and he’d even won an Emmy. He wanted to make his own work, but he was getting slowed down by the super long wait time to export files, which are called “renders.”

PAUL MARINO: We would send off animation renders that would take days to produce–48 hours or so–just to have something to look at. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: But when Paul Marino was playing the video game Quake, he realized he could control the animation of the characters instantaneously. And he played with some friends who were also in the world of film, like Frank Dellario. 

FRANK DELLARIO: If you’re making a live action TV show, it would be a lot of work to set up a shot. And it would take you maybe a whole day or half a day. Where in Quake, we’re pumping out shots. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Paul, the animator, and Frank, the live action filmmaker, were both feeling the same pain–that making movies just took way too long. But in Quake, everything was easier. You push a button, the character moves right away. And you can just film the animation like a regular live action movie. 

Paul and Frank loved playing around with it. And when they realized that people were recording their gameplay to brag about how good they were, they saw the potential. With their combined experience in animation and live action filmmaking, they started making their own movies inside Quake. And this was the birth of the Ill Clan. 

ILL CLAN TAG: Rockin’ to the beat from New York to Japan, it’s the Ill Clan… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: The Ill Clan was made up of seven friends in New York City who played Quake together, and they all came up with ill names. For example, Paul Marino was Ill Robinson, named after “Danger, Will Robinson” from Lost in Space. And Frank Dellario was Ill Bixby, named after Bill Bixpy, the actor who played the Incredible Hulk in the ’70s. 

To make movies in Quake, the Ill Clan all got together in one room with their computers connected via cables, and each person would puppeteer a character. But instead of moving around to play the game, they would do it to tell a story. This, of course, was all before the screen recording we know today. So, to film their movies, the Ill Clan had to make what’s called a “demo file,” which could be shared online and played back inside another player’s copy of Quake. And this wasn’t the only technical limitation they were dealing with. 

PAUL MARINO: Whenever you ran out of ammo, they gave you a melee weapon to use. And the melee weapon was an ax. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Because they were working inside Quake, the Ill Clan had to figure out a reason for their characters to be carrying around axes. So, they turned them into lumberjacks. 

PAUL MARINO: How do we justify them walking around with axes? So, you’re like, “Okay, well, we can at least make them look like lumberjacks if we can’t take away their axes.”

ANDREW CALLAWAY: So their first film, titled Apartment Huntin’, was about lumberjacks looking for an apartment. 

APARTMENT HUNTIN’: You guys are both carrying axes! All three of you are!

ANDREW CALLAWAY: The 3D graphics of Quake were impressive for the time, but the characters were still pretty blocky. And there wasn’t a lot of details in the faces. So, like a theatre production, they had to rely on loud performances to get their emotions across. 

APARTMENT HUNTIN’: Whoa! Whoa! Not a lumberjack!

ANDREW CALLAWAY: They called Apartment Huntin’ a “qartune,” like a cartoon but with a “Q” for “Quake.” Their work was super inspired by Looney Tunes and the Marx Brothers. It’s a lot of silly, slapstick comedy. And to film the action, the Ill Clan designated one player as the camera person, whose point of view captured all the action. 

PAUL MARINO: One of the things about creating a Quake movie was that it also needed to play back in Quake. We didn’t have YouTube at the time, so it wasn’t like you could just upload a stream file for people to watch. And as a result of that, in order to do an edit, the camera person effectively would need to teleport. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Okay, so there are interdimensional gateways in Quake that the player can use to fast travel between locations. The Ill Clan repurposed them to imitate the effect of having multiple cameras by teleporting the camera person to a different location in order to get a different angle. For example, in Apartment Huntin’, the two main lumberjack characters get separated. And it intercuts between them in different rooms. 

APARTMENT HUNTIN’: Dukakis could not have won that election. Well, the problem was he understood the political machine, but– Wow! Nice pool!

PAUL MARINO: This intercut between this very kind of intellectual discussion. 

APARTMENT HUNTIN’: But Heidegger and Hegel didn’t even know each other! But they understood existence. They understood how it preceded essence…

PAUL MARINO: And just this absolute– The most stupid thing we could show on screen. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: People in the Quake community loved Apartment Huntin’. Their demo file became a cult favorite. But Paul had a bigger vision for Machinima. He wanted people who didn’t play Quake to be able to watch their movies. And so he started a nonprofit called the Academy for Machinima Arts and Sciences, which claimed that Machinima was going to take over Hollywood by speeding up production 30% to 40%. Machinima became very popular very quickly. A sitcom-style show filmed in the game Halo, called Red vs. Blue, was a massive success. It spawned a company called Rooster Teeth. There was also a website called machinima.com, which was a central hub for viewing Machinima films before YouTube existed. 

In 2001, Time Out New York wrote a feature about Machinima featuring quotes from Roger Ebert, who said, “Machinima proved that affordable, accessible animation is on the way.” Soon, Machinima started making appearances on television. The Drew Carey Show filmed inside The Sims. The Beastie Boys directed a music video in NBA Street 3 for MTV. But perhaps the biggest piece of machinimated TV came via Comedy Central. 

SOUTH PARK: This could very well lead to the end of the world of Warcraft… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: In an episode of South Park called Make Love, Not Warcraft, the characters’ voices were coming out of their avatars in the World of Warcraft video game. This episode actually won an Emmy. The South Park guys needed to make it as Machinima because of the show’s super quick production schedule. Here’s South Park’s Trey Parker talking about that in an audio commentary. 

TREY PARKER: It’s kind of like directing a live action shoot. You’re just sitting there going, “Okay, everyone run over here.” And they would just all do it within the game, and we’d capture that. Having to animate all those individually would have taken forever. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: With all of this happening, machinima.com became an economic powerhouse, becoming one of YouTube’s top five channels, reaching over a billion monthly views. They made a deal with game studios so machinimators could monetize their work. For a time, it seemed like a few lucky creators could make a career from Machinima. 

While Machinima was going mainstream, the original artists, like Paul Marino, were still off on the sidelines trying to make art with their work and push the medium forward. All these television shows got permission from the people who made the games to broadcast their work. But a lot of independent creators, like Paul, couldn’t make real money off of Machinima.

PAUL MARINO: We were in this kind of punk rock phase where we’re like, “Yeah, we’ll do all this stuff with this game technology and [BLEEP] all the legal stuff around it!” But at the same time, we want to be looked at as people that are serious about our craft. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: As Machinima started to find audiences and commercial success, the Ill Klan were setting out to prove that Machinima should be taken seriously as an art form. For the sequel to Apartment Huntin’, Paul Marino hacked into Quake and imported his own custom 3D models. So they weren’t using any of the game’s IP–like characters or locations–just the underlying software that makes the game run in real time. The Ill Klan were winning a bunch of awards at film festivals around the world. But the Ill Klan’s next big innovation is what took Machinima to the next level. Everything they had made up until this point was basically an animated film that happens to have been made inside a video game. In 2004, they were invited to the Florida Film Festival for their first ever live performance. 

NEWS ANNOUNCER: The Ill Klan is about to take the process one step further. They’re now ready to produce a Machinima film in front of a live audience… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Frank Dellario from Ill Klan told me that the Florida Film Festival had heard about how they could render animation in real time. 

FRANK DELLARIO: What they heard was: “Oh, they do live animation?” So they contact us like, “Hey, you wanna come down to the Florida Film Festival and do live animation?” 

COOK CARL: Ciao! Benvenuto and welcome to Common Sense of Cooking with Cook Carl, the show where you can learn to cook just like Cook Carl. And today we’re… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Thanks to Paul’s custom 3D models, the digital puppeteers could now control not only the mouths of the characters to lip sync to what they were saying, but also subtle facial expressions, like raising an eyebrow. And they could do it live. They made a film in real time called Common Sense Cooking with Carl the Cook. 

LENNY LUMBERJACK: I was thinking maybe to make this into Lenny Lumberjack’s Cooking Show. What do you think? 

COOK CARL: I don’t think it’s a good idea, no. 

LENNY LUMBERJACK: Yeah, they like the idea. 

LARRY: Cook Carl, it’ll be fine. It’s human interest. Let’s go in the back. 

LENNY LUMBERJACK: Sorry, Carl, you’re out…

FRANK DELLARIO: Afterwards, people were kind of like, “Whoa.” They were, like, freaking out. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: It’s understandable that people were freaking out! Nobody had ever seen anything like live animation. Characters up on a movie screen responding to the audience in real time. It was a huge hit, and they took the show on the road, performing live at Stanford and even the Lincoln Center. The Ill Clan were the first people to really take advantage of the real time aspect of Machinima to do something completely unique, beyond simply making animation faster. 

The very next year–2005–Halo 2 dropped. It included a voice chat for players to talk with each other–both friends and strangers. This was revolutionary for Machinima. No one had ever filmed a movie in a functioning, active, virtual world full of people from around our terrestrial world. This opened up lots of new possibilities, like a live talk show!

THIS SPARTAN LIFE ANNOUNCER: Live from New Mombasa, in the unpredictable multiplayer universe, This Spartan Life…

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Six months after Halo 2 dropped, a musician named Chris Burke came out with the first episode of This Spartan Life, a late night talk show with monologues, sketches, and a host trying to hold it all together while strangers killed the people he was interviewing. 

DAMIAN LACEDAEMOAN: Hey guys, no burning the guests alive please…

ANDREW CALLAWAY: What made This Spartan Life so special is that it’s not just an animated talk show. The host and the guest are surrounded by real people who are playing the game. 

CHRIS BURKE: There’s so many outtakes I have of me just, like, yelling at the people in the game, like, “Don’t kill the guest!”

DAMIAN LACEDAEMOAN: We’re shooting… Bad choice of words. We’re recording an interview… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: The show is largely an investigation into what it means to exist as a human in one of these virtual worlds. And no guest spoke better to the magic of being an artist in the online game space than Malcolm McLaren, legendary fashion designer and manager of the Sex Pistols. 

MALCOLM MCLAREN: The virtual world becomes a more comfortable world, a world where that outlaw spirit can exist, and a world where you can absolutely continue to have magnificent failures–a world where you can, in truth, become an artist again. This is the real true story of Rock and Roll. It was not about anything other than how to live your life as a gangster in sartorial splendor and turning the world into a place where normality would never return again. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: This new direction for Machinima led to many imitators that got a lot of media attention and traveled to film festivals around the world. The French Democracy, Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator–the list goes on. But the golden age of Machinima only lasted a few years. First, machinima.com took a turn for the worse. According to Chris Burke, a lot of young Machinima creators signed bad contracts with them. 

CHRIS BURKE: Within a few years, they got a little bit older and realized what had happened. And they started being very vocal about it on the internet, and machinima.com got a really bad name. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Eventually, machinima.com realized that they didn’t even need machinimators. You could get even more views on a video of someone just playing a game and talking–no edits, no scripts, no fancy filmmaking. And popular shows like Red vs. Blue also stopped making Machinima and switched to traditional animation. Machinima.com and Rooster Teeth both ended up getting bought out and shut down by AT&T, and their entire archives were erased. Today, if you go to machinima.com, you’re forwarded to Warner Brothers Discovery’s website. 

And independent machinimators felt they weren’t being taken seriously as artists either. Paul Marino of the Ill Clan was invited to an animation festival in Canada that had an award category specifically for Machinima. But they decided not to give an award to any of the nominees. 

PAUL MARINO: Right at that point, I stood up and walked out. And all the other Machinima filmmakers followed me. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: A lot of other Machinima creators followed Paul out of the Machinima game and into the video game game. Paul went to work on video games, making what are called “cinematics” or “cutscenes,” the parts of the game that just play like a movie to move the story along. Frank Dellario of the Ill Clan held on for a long time. He made an episode of CSI: New York where Gary Sinise finds a killer through Second Life. 

CSI: NY: It’s a metaverse, an online social network inside a virtual world… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: And a Super Bowl commercial for the sitcom Two and a Half Men using The Sims. 

ALAN HARPER: Charlie, the virtual world is amazing. I can be anything or go anywhere I want. Charlie, why aren’t you changing? 

CHARLIE HARPER: Alan, I’m single, rich. And I live at the beach. I’m okay with reality… 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: But eventually, the novelty wore off. And paying work making Machinima disappeared completely. 

FRANK DELLARIO: We stopped in 2010, officially. And then we went into just traditional video from that point. Yeah.

ANDREW CALLAWAY: And did you miss, you know, making movies in the video games? 

FRANK DELLARIO: At the time, I don’t think I did. But at one point I’m working at an ad agency here, and it was in San Francisco. I was a project manager. And we’re doing, you know, mobile websites and things like that for AT&T–for big clients–and stuff like that. And at one point, I show one of the videos that we did. And it was a VP, and she goes, “Oh my God, what are you doing here?” I was like, “Oh my god.” You know, you felt terrible because we were in New York Times Magazine. We performed live at Lincoln Center and all that. And I imagine, like a band, you have your period of time and then after you’re not the belle of the ball anymore. And then what? 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: All of this Machinima history went away and was forgotten. And for a full decade–the 2010s–not much happened. But now, finally, I feel like the dream of Machinima taking over the cinemas is coming true. A lot of Hollywood movies use virtual production–a technique in which real time video game engines, like Unreal, are used to put actors in virtual environments. This is what they use on a little movie series called Avatar and the Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian. Virtual production isn’t exactly Machinima, but it wouldn’t exist without Machinima. And Machinima proper is coming back, too. And it’s not just Grand Theft Hamlet. There’s a whole new wave of documentary Machinima. Knit’s Island, another documentary filmed inside an online video game, has won lots of awards at film festivals. It was even nominated for Best Feature at the same film festival that Paul Marino walked out of. And a film called The Remarkable Life of Ibelin won Best Documentary at Sundance and was shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. It uses Machinima to recreate the virtual life of Mats Steen, a teenager with muscular dystrophy, who lived a vivid life online in the World of Warcraft. 

MATS STEEN: In there, my chains are broken and I can be whoever I want to be… 

LISETTE ROOVERS: We had the whole “let’s go on a date together.” And he would get the flowers… 

MATS STEEN: It was just a virtual kiss. But boy, I could almost feel it…

ANDREW CALLAWAY: To me, this doesn’t feel like a flash in the pan. Machinima is taking the documentary film world by storm. Remarkable Life of Ibelin has been a huge hit on Netflix. And Grand Theft Hamlet became the first Machinima ever to be released in movie theaters earlier this year. 

PINNY GRYLLS: I’m kind of surprised that we are weirdly, like, the first Machinima film to be distributed in a cinema. I think there’ll be more stuff like this. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Pinny and the rest of the Grand Theft Hamlet team loved working inside a video game and the things that it unlocked for them as no budget indie filmmakers making a movie in their bedroom. For example, they got to film on a blimp for free, which is nice. Also–Hamlet–it’s a ghost story, but they didn’t have to design any crazy special effects. They could just turn the character into a ghost using “passive mode.”

MARK OOSTERVEEN: In passive mode, in the game, you’re transparent. You’re kind of see-through. And people can literally walk through you.

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Pinny was also intrigued by the limitations of filming in GTA V because, when you’re making a movie inside a game, you have to follow some rules. 

PINNY GRYLLS: There was actually some super really interesting things which I wish I’d put more into the film about, like, weird workarounds that he had to do. Like, the closet scene–obviously Polonius has to get murdered by Hamlet or accidentally. But you can’t kill people inside. 

MARK OOSTERVEEN: Yes. You cannot be killed in an indoor space in GTA V. So we had to find somewhere where there was something that could conceivably be a closet. But it had to be outside. 

SAM CRANE: So we used the grotto in– in– 

PINNY GRYLLS: The paper mansion. 

MARK OOSTERVEEN: Yeah. Yeah. So it was tricky.

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Despite the challenges, Pinny sees a lot of benefits to working in Machinima as a documentarian, even now that the pandemic’s over. In fact, she’s now working on an expanded, immersive version of their Grand Theft Hamlet performance called Be the Players Ready. So much of making a documentary is about access. And for Pinny, one of the most amazing things about filming inside an online video game is that you can meet and talk with people all around the world without leaving your apartment. The magic of Machinima is in how it can connect people who would have never ever been in the same place otherwise. 

PINNY GRYLLS: I think that it just gives you access and opportunity to find all these amazing characters. I think that’s something that is pretty unique. I mean, I don’t know of another environment that offers that. There’s something inherently exciting about that game space. And, like, I think the filmmakers worth their salt are always attracted to making films that reflect the world we live in, right? And increasingly people are living in game spaces for many hours a day. And it would be very odd if we didn’t start turning our attention to those narratives and to those relationships and to those communities. And so, it was kind of inevitable in a way. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Pinny’s not done making art with video games. She learned, while making Grand Theft Hamlet, there are things you can only film inside a game. 

ROMAN MARS: We have more with Andrew Callaway after this… 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: Ben Brock Johnson. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Roman Mars! 

ROMAN MARS: We are back with Andrew Callaway. Hey, Andrew! 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Hey, Roman! Hey, Ben! 

ROMAN MARS: So, I know there are a lot of recent developments in the world of Machinima that we couldn’t get to in your story. And you want to talk about some of them. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Yeah! Right. So, you know, there’s this big renaissance in Machinima right now. You remember in the story I talked about Rooster Teeth? They were the company that made Red vs. Blue.

ROMAN MARS: Yes. Red vs. Blue was my first introduction to all of this. It was a big deal when it came out, when I was aware of it. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Well, so Rooster Teeth–the company that made Red vs. Blue–were bought out in 2014. And AT&T shut down their archives last year. But now one of the original creators just bought back the company name and has, like, revived the domain and the archives. And presumably they’re planning on bringing back Red vs. Blue, one of the most popular Machinima series of all time. But also there’s a lot of new people getting into the world of Machinima. Like, do you know the filmmaker Harmony Korine? 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I saw Kids when it came out and… Yeah, I will never forget seeing Kids. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: And Spring Breakers as well. He has done a lot of crazy stuff. But now he’s interested in video game technology. And he’s set up a studio called EDGLRD, but–you know–it’s missing some vowels in there.

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Of course it’s called EDGLRD. Of course it’s called EDGLRD.

ANDREW CALLAWAY: And, you know, his latest film, Baby Invasion, played the Venice Film Festival. And he’s using Machinima technology to be able to kind of remix it live as a kind of DJ VJ set, which is cool. But for me, the best shot of Machinima entering mass culture is a thing called Skibidi Toilet. You’ve all heard of this, I assume. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: I of course know what Skibidi Toilet is–in passing, certainly–although I’m not Generation Alpha. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Well, it’s a YouTube series. And yes, it went super viral. It was so popular at its height. It was getting over 3 billion monthly views, which is more successful than any TV show ever. But what most people don’t know about it is that it’s Machinima. 

ROMAN MARS: Huh. That’s so cool. So could you explain to us a little bit what Skibidi Toilet is all about? 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Sure. But I actually talked to a YouTuber named MatPat, who created the very popular channel Game Theory. And I think he can explain it a little bit better than me. 

MATPAT: It is an epic, Transformers-like battle between a faction of camera-headed people versus a faction of toilets with heads coming out of them. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. Yep, of course. Of course. Okay, so let me repeat this back so that I make sure I got it right. There are toilets with human heads. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Yes. 

ROMAN MARS: And then there are other creatures with human bodies but camera heads. And they are fighting in a battle. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: A Transformers-like battle, Roman. Transformers-like battle. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s right. [CHUCKLES] So how do camera heads and toilet head people fight? 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: So it really starts with the camera-headed people just flushing the human heads down the toilet. And then, you know, the toilets fight back with lasers out of their eyes that they shoot at people. And next thing you know entire cities are getting decimated. The scale gets bigger and bigger and bigger because, eventually, the Skibidi Toilets and the Camera head people have to join forces to fight a new enemy called Astro Toilets, which are enormous. And they fly around and they have lots of heavy machinery attached to them and, like, spinning claws and are very intense. And I know that this all sounds pretty ridiculous, but–

ROMAN MARS: No! It sounds perfectly normal. But go on.

ANDREW CALLAWAY: A lot of people would call it brain rot or something like that, like it’s just a random collection of stupid scatological humor. But I think the filmmaking is actually pretty sophisticated. For the first 50 episodes, each scene is an unbroken oner. So there’s very sophisticated blocking happening in all of these fight scenes that must’ve been very, very hard to make and design. But it can also be viewed as a piece of media criticism. And MatPat says that it can be viewed as an allegory for our media landscape.

MATPAT: If you look at how the toilets and the cameras are depicted throughout these 77 episodes, you can tell a meta-narrative about YouTube versus traditional media or digital creators versus traditional creators, right? The toilets–they are these creatures of memedom. They’re made out of Machinima. And then contrast that with the camera people, who are high-caliber production equipment, movie cameras, high-end audio equipment… They attack using the THX sound effect. They’re like, “Bwaaah!” to test out movie theater sound systems, right? They’re attacking with the medium of traditional, old school entertainment, like higher end classier stuff. Both sides are represented from a different form of music. On one side, you have the toilets that are represented by this kind of mishmash of songs fused together to create this earworm. 

[EARWORM MUSIC]

MATPAT: Contrast that with the Alliance, the camera-headed people, who use Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears–classic, like, 1980s nostalgia, right? So, again, you have this battle between new media–new music–versus old school stuff. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: I get it. I get it. What about you, Roman? 

ROMAN MARS: I’m catching on to it. This sounds pretty good and more sophisticated than I maybe first thought in the very beginning. But I guess it doesn’t explain to me what the Astro Toilets are all about. What is their theme song, or what is their agenda? 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Great question! I asked MatPat about this, and I thought his theory was pretty interesting.

MATPAT: Oh man, I don’t have a whole lot of evidence to support it. It’s still early in the Astro Toilet lore. When I look at just broad strokes of what the story has become, you have YouTube–the digital content–has had to join forces with traditional media through the camera heads. And what’s the new existential threat for both of these worlds? It’s AI. It’s the computer generated stuff. So they need to work together to take down this big existential threat, Astro Toilet AI. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Yeah, and one of the things that I love personally thinking about Machinima is that the creator of Skibidi Toilet is a 25-year-old guy from the country of Georgia. And now he has created one of the most successful pieces of IP introduced in the past decade. And so it feels like Machinima has had this democratizing effect that people have been talking about, you know, back in the ’90s. 

ROMAN MARS: You know, when you put it that way– I mean, I know I was kind of dismissive of Skibidi Toilet in the beginning. I mean, like, you know, I’m only human. I’m old. But when you talk about this 25-year-old guy from Georgia making this hugely popular– It speaks to so many people with tools that you can purchase online and do it. That is kind of amazing. I mean, I was amazed by zines and punk rock. It’s the same principle to me. I kind of love it. And if new generations of people are not making art that offends and confounds older people, then they’re not trying hard enough. That’s what art should be about–being confusing to me. So, I actually love it. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: And you can watch five or six episodes in about a minute or two because most of them are under 10 seconds. 

ROMAN MARS: 10 seconds? 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Yeah, real quick. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh. Yeah. Well, that earns the name brain rot if the narrative is 10 seconds long? Oh my goodness!

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: You know–pair of baby shoes never worn. You can do it, Roman. I believe it. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, that’s true. Thank you, Andrew.

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Thanks a lot, Andrew. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Thanks, guys! 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Now, Roman, before we end this episode, I have a question for you. 

ANDREW CALLAWAY: Shoot. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: You’re our hero. You’re on a big, big quest. And as you’re traveling along the open road–the dangerous open road–your journey is interrupted by a fellow traveler who needs your help. If you help them, you’re veering off from your main quest. Your interruption might lead you to a place where there be dragons, but also maybe where there be treasure, which could help you in your larger quest. Roman Mars–the hero of our story–would you take this side quest? 

ROMAN MARS: I always take a side quest. I always take a side quest because the big game is hard to complete and the side quest is so satisfying. It’s like a thing on your to-do list that you can knock off first thing in the day, like brushing your teeth or something. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Your Always Be Side-Questing T-shirt is in the mail. So look out for that. And Roman Mars, fellow traveler and adventurer and side quester, I have good news for you. We have put together a couple of special side quest episodes for Hidden Levels listeners. And your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find these episodes on the Endless Thread feed and listen to them. The first one is out today. It comes to us from producer Frannie Monahan. Hey, Frannie. 

FRANNIE MONAHAN: Hello. 

ROMAN MARS: So, Frannie, what journey are you taking us on with this side quest? 

FRANNIE MONAHAN: Well, you could say that my side quest is pretty character driven, as in it’s about characters. 

ROMAN MARS: Like any good movie or piece of fiction, they’re all character-based in the end, aren’t they? 

FRANNIE MONAHAN: Yeah, and specifically this story is about the characters you get to design yourself in games. So their body, their clothes, their skills… And it’s about how creating a character and playing as that character can be a really powerful way to explore your own character–IRL–your identity. 

STEF SANJATI: My mom and my brother specifically were asking, “Why do you spend so much time with this game? Why is it so important that you play this character?” And I said, “Because I get to be beautiful.” It wasn’t about a peak physical beauty that I wanted. I just wanted to feel good about myself. I wanted to feel at home in my body. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, that sounds so cool. I cannot wait to listen. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Yeah, and you can listen to that story right now on the Endless Thread feed. 

ROMAN MARS: Coming up Tuesday on Hidden Levels–our fifth episode–how video games shape our natural world. 

CASSIE ANNE: I can build my house on a beach. I can build my house in a rainforest, you know? I can’t do that in real life. 

ROMAN MARS: This episode was produced by Andrew Callaway, edited by Chris Berube, mixed by Martín Gonzalez, fact-checking by Lara Bullens. Original music by Swan Real, Jamilah Sandoto, and Paul Vaitkus. The super cool music by Swan and Paul for Hidden Levels is being released as an album! You can listen everywhere you stream music. 

Special thanks to Anna Hanks, Dr. Henry Lowood, and Matteo Bittanti. 

The managing producer for Hidden levels is Chris Berube. 

BEN BROCK JOHNSON: Hidden Levels was created by me, Ben Brock Johnson, while fleeing a Lionel on the way to Level 9 Death Mountain in Zelda–with power-ups and cheat codes thanks to Team 99% Invisible and Team Endless Thread. 

Endless thread is a production of WBUR, Boston’s NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet includes… My illustrious co-host, Anne Marie Sievertzen, managing producer Selma Tajoschi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Franny Monahan, and sound designer, Emily Jankowski. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible’s executive producer is Kathy Tu. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jayson DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. 

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.

We’ll see you for a new episode of Hidden Levels, on Tuesday.